Wednesday

Aug 29, 2018 at 2:00 AM

Our past has been good more often than not, but sometimes it has been bad and ugly. We must not forget any of it.

It has been my honor and privilege to serve the people of the great State of North Carolina for more than half of my life, first as a professor of American history at East Carolina University in Greenville and then at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, my undergraduate alma mater in my hometown. I recently retired after a 22 year career in UNCW’s Department of History. Go Seahawks! I continue to serve as a member of the North Carolina Historical Commission, to which I was appointed by then-Gov. Pat McCrory in 2014.

In the aftermath of the horrific violence that occurred as a result of the controversy over the equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Gov. Roy Cooper petitioned the N.C. Historical Commission to give him the authority to relocate three Confederate statues — an obelisk to the Confederate dead of North Carolina; a statue to Private Henry Lawson Wyatt, the first Tar Heel killed in action during the war; and a memorial to North Carolina women of the Confederacy — from the grounds of the old State Capitol in historic downtown Raleigh to the Bentonville Battlefield State Historic Site in Johnston County. I was subsequently asked by the Deputy Secretary of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to serve with four other members of the Historical Commission on the newly formed Confederate Monuments Study Committee to seek clarification of the 2015 General Assembly’s Statute 100-2.1, Protection of Monuments, Memorials, and Works of Art, and to make recommendations to the commission concerning the governor’s request.

Ably led by David Ruffin of Raleigh, who chairs both the Historical Commission and the Confederate Monuments Study Committee, the group worked diligently for 11 months, seeking public input, legal advice, and historical precedence from academic historians. In the end we proposed three resolutions to the commission for consideration. First, that there is a glaring overrepresentation of monuments to the Confederacy on Capitol Square. Second, that the Historical Commission did not possess the authority, in its interpretation of state law, to nullify General Statute 100-2.1. Beyond the somewhat ambiguous legal issue involved, the committee recommended that the Confederate monuments not be relocated or removed. Third, in order to provide greater understanding of North Carolina’s role in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the committee resolved that the state should put up signage in the form of markers or plaques adjacent to the statues and memorials. For example, when were they erected and by whom? Did the politics of race and identity influence the people and organizations that funded the construction of the monuments? What are the debates concerning their representation in the twenty-first century?

To address the egregious imbalance of monuments to only North Carolina Confederates, the committee also advised the General Assembly to act “without delay” to appropriate funding for statues to ethnic minorities in the state during the Civil War era, beginning with one to African Americans. Eventually that effort might become a public/private venture and work to erect memorials to Native Americans and Unionists. The idea is to recognize the contributions of a greater cross section of North Carolinians during the Civil War.

Given the divisive political climate in our state and country today, the resolutions proposed by the Confederate Monuments Study Committee were controversial. Casting an ominous shadow over the proceedings of the Historical Commission in Raleigh on Aug. 22 was the toppling of “Silent Sam,” the statue to students from the University of North Carolina who fought for the Confederacy, by “protesters” less than two days before. Undeterred and unintimidated, the Historical Commission voted 9-1 in support of the committee’s resolutions.

I favored the commission’s decision and was satisfied that the Confederate Monuments Study Committee had offered a fair and reasonable compromise on the highly charged political, racial, and cultural issues. Along with my committee and commission colleagues, I gave long and deliberate thought to the governor’s petition and, admittedly, it has taken a personal toll.

I concluded that we cannot alter or change history or right past wrongs and injustices by attempting to erase it or by relocating, removing, or obliterating monuments to people and events of the past. We should study history to remind us, teach us, guide us, and inspire us to be better persons and better citizens. We must not, however, use it to wage cultural warfare against one another or for political gain. We are all Americans in this journey we travel together while enjoying its blessings and preserving them for our posterity as a reminder of who were are and what we hope to make of ourselves. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed: “We may have arrived here on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now.”

In his 1951 novel, “Requiem for a Nun,” William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Our shared history has shaped and continues to shape us as individuals and as residents of our communities, states, and nation. As a professional historian for forty years now, my responsibility has been to seek to understand, interpret, and explain historical events, themes, and the motives of history makers. Our past has been good more often than not, but sometimes it has been bad and ugly. We must not forget any of it.

As to the Confederate monuments on the old State Capitol grounds, I first ask my fellow Tar Heels to try and understand what they symbolize to those who want them taken down. For them they represent slavery, racism, segregation, and white supremacy. Indeed, many of the Confederate monuments were erected during the days of segregation, Jim Crow laws, and racial unrest. Let’s take a closer look back.

The Confederate States of America was established in large part to protect and defend the institution of slavery and keep black Americans, totaling almost 4,000,000 in 1860, enslaved and suppressed. To be sure, there were other economic, political, and cultural disputes between the North and the South, but slavery, most notably its expansion into the western territories, became the main issue dividing the country. “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended,” President Lincoln pointed out in his 1861 inaugural speech. “This is the only substantial dispute.”

Slavery had existed in all of the states until the American Revolutionary War. Endorsing the Declaration of Independence’s ringing phrase that “all men are created equal,” Northern states, beginning with Vermont in 1777, passed gradual emancipation laws. New Jersey was the last state in the old Union to do so and yet the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware maintained slavery while remaining in the Union during the Civil War.

Northern cotton refineries, banks, insurance companies, merchants, and others benefited financially from the bondage system in the Southern states during the antebellum period, along with large slave owners in the South, of course.

Eleven Southern states seceded after Lincoln’s election as U.S. president in 1860. Lincoln’s Republican Party called for the confinement of slavery in its current boundaries and a prohibition of its spread into the western territories. For Southern slaveholders, the policy spelled ultimate doom. They must be allowed to extend slavery into the territories and eventually turn those areas into slave states. As long as there were an equal number of slave states to free states, Southern politicians could block any national legislation, in the Senate at least, that threatened their economic and political interests. Although in the minority (25 percent of Southerners owned slaves), Southern slaveholders in 1860 had more than $100 billion in today’s money invested in slaves and land. They meant to protect their financial welfare by any means necessary.

In February 1861, before Lincoln’s inauguration the following month, delegates from seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Confederate States of America and write a constitution. Whereas the U.S. Constitution did not mention the word slavery but instead cited the phrase "Person[s] held to Service or Labor,” the Confederate Constitution, adopted on March 11, 1861, addressed the legality of slavery directly and by name in two articles and four sections, including:

Article I Section 9 (4)

No law denying or impairing the right of property in Negro slaves shall be passed.

Speaking in Savannah, Georgia only ten days after the Confederate government adopted its constitution, Vice President Alexander Stephens claimed that “Our new government is founded upon the idea, its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.” Confederate President Jefferson Davis insisted that, "African slavery, as it exists, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing." Only after the war ended in Confederate defeat did Stephens, Davis, and other proponents of slavery claim that the war had been caused by constitutional issues.

Someone told me recently that the South’s disputes with the North that led to secession and war were about taxes, tariffs, and states’ rights. Were disagreements over taxes and tariffs worth risking war? And what did Southerners mean by states’ rights? They meant the right to maintain their institutions, and the main institution they wanted to protect was slavery. Yet had slavery not existed, there would have been no Three Fifths Compromise of 1787. Had slavery not existed, there would have been no Missouri Compromise of 1820. Had slavery not existed, there would have been no Wilmot Proviso of 1846. Had slavery not existed, there would have been no Compromise of 1850. Had slavery not existed, there would have been no Kansas/Nebraska Act of 1854. Had slavery not existed, there would have been no Dred Scott Decision of 1857. Had slavery not existed, there would have been no John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Had slavery not existed, there would have been no Crisis of the Union. Had slavery not existed, there would have been no Civil War.

Now consider the views of those who support the Confederate statues in Raleigh remaining in place. By my calculations, based on comments made to the Confederate Monuments’ Study Committee during its principal public forum in March 2018 and views and opinions posted on the public portal on the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources’ website, more than 80 percent of North Carolinians who responded are not in favor of relocating or removing them. Clearly the statues and memorials hold different meanings to different people, despite the fact that no one today condones slavery. I know no one who believes that slavery was anything but an evil, cruel, and inhumane system of permanent bondage that denied African Americans their freedom and agency.

After talking with hundreds of people about the Confederate monuments controversy, although mostly listening, I do not believe they idolize the Confederacy or the statues and memorials, and they do not live in the past. Yet the past is important to them. For some the monuments represent the sacrifice of their ancestors who were killed or died during the war. For others they pay tribute to the Southern soldiers’ sense of duty to defend their families, homes, and states against the Union, and the women on the home front who supported the cause. Many veterans consider them war memorials to American servicemen and women. In fact, to this day the U.S. government recognizes Confederate soldiers as American fighting men, and provides at taxpayers’ expense gravestones to mark their final resting place in both private and public cemeteries and graveyards. For still others the statues have become a part of the historical landscape and should be preserved as a reminder of our state’s history, the good and the bad.

A colleague once told me that he believed monuments should be erected to, and cities, towns, buildings, schools, parks, and streets named for “only those people who share our values.” But whose values take precedence, and who gets to claim the moral authority to make such determinations? Being offended does not give any one person or group of people the right to shape the world only in their image at the expense of those who see the world differently. There must be a willingness among us to share public spaces with those whose political and cultural views do not match our own. It is democratic, it is egalitarian, and it is healthy for our nation to do so. To do otherwise would be destructive.

While the controversy over the Confederate monuments is mostly a cultural and political one, there is an economic element involved. The N.C. Historical Commission’s decision not to relocate them, even if it had the legal authority to do so, will save the taxpayers of North Carolina perhaps more than $1 million. The state will probably invest less than $10,000 to put up markers providing historical context for the three monuments. Conversely, the state would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to move them to the Bentonville Battlefield State Historic Site, 46 miles east of Raleigh. The state would also potentially spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight lawsuits that have been threatened by heritage groups if the statues are taken down.

Another one of my colleagues in the Department of History at UNCW once commented facetiously: “Ah, the Civil War, the war that just keeps on going.” Sometimes I wonder if she wasn’t just whistlin’ “Dixie.” With all due respect to her, President Lincoln put it more eloquently when, in 1862, he reminded his fellow Americans that “we cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We hold the power, and bear the responsibility. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

Dr. Chris E. Fonvielle Jr. is Wilmington native, historian, author, and former associate professor in the Department of History at UNC Wilmington. He received his Ph.D. in American history at the University of South Carolina. Upon his retirement at the end of the spring semester 2018, Dr. Fonvielle was awarded the Order of the Long Leaf Pine for distinguished service to the State of North Carolina.

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